Woodworking Machinery

Overview

Under the roof of EUMABOIS and VDMA, the JWG WWM develops specifications for commonly used woodworking machines and equipment used in primary and secondary wood processing.
Woodworking machines (WWM) are stationary or displaceable machines designed to machine and/or process wood and material with similar physical characteristics to wood, such as chipboard, fibreboard and plywood, including when covered with plastic or light alloy laminates/edges, as well as cork, bone, rigid rubber or plastics.
The production in the woodworking industry nowadays implies more and more digital manufacturing processes to gain efficiency and competitiveness through integrated data management and analysis. This means that woodworking machines need to be connected to each other and form a production network linked to an ERP/MES system or a cloud. Without a standard communication protocol connecting machinery from different suppliers, software programming is always required, thus affecting efficiency and costs.
For this reason, leading European woodworking machinery manufacturers define a common language, that enables a seamless communication between machines of different brands. The framework for a new standard, called “Plug & Work”, was launched at LIGNA 2019. This project is specific for the woodworking industry and is based upon the OPC UA standard (Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture).

Technical Overview

The OPC UA WWM Companion Specification (CS) will be split up into several parts from part 1 to part n.

• Part 1 is a generic interface for connecting woodworking machines of different manufacturers uniformly to systems for data management/data processing (e.g. ERP, MES, data analysis, …). The focus of part 1 is on generic communication elements between the systems at the control level and the machines in production, which are independent of the manufacturing technologies employed. The Working Group works closely with the umati joint working group which is working on information models for metalworking machine tools.
  The information elements are identified by means of the analysis of use cases. The use cases determine which parameters are available in the information model, provide important information about how these parameters look and how they fit into the overall context of a woodworking machine.
• In further parts of the specification, these communication elements are supplemented by technology-dependent extensions, so that manufacturer-independent communication methods are available for different manufacturing technologies.
• Part 2 covers CNC routing and boring machines for woodworking. These machines are similar to CNC routing machines for metalworking.
• Additional parts of the WWM CS are planned for other commonly used machines in secondary wood processing: panel sawing machines, profiling machines, edge-banding machines and boring machines. The information models in these parts will extend part 1 of this series so as to cover the specific technical details of the machines and relevant use cases.
• In addition, production cells and lines containing robots and other work-piece handling systems are envisaged. The information models to be developed will be aligned as closely as possible with other CS. In particular, production cells and productions lines in the woodworking industry encompass various intralogistics systems. Where CS for such systems do not exist, they will be developed in close co-operation with the relevant manufacturers.